Canada Post says it had to hire as many as 3,000 additional seasonal staff this year to deal with a record-breaking 20 per cent increase in packages over the holiday shopping season.

Canada Post said more than one million parcels a day have been delivered to Canadians since Nov. 14.

The jump continued to highlight a steady trend in which Canadians are devoting more of their shopping to online retailers, who ship packages straight to a person’s doorstep. Between 2012 and 2016, Canada Post’s e-commerce holiday volumes have doubled.

Aside from the extra staff, Canada Post has added 1,000 trucks to its fleet to handle the volume and has its processing centres operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

According to the 2017 holiday retail survey released annually by consulting firm Deloitte, respondents expected to spend as much as 51 per cent of their holiday shopping budget with online retailers. Those same respondents expected to spend about 42 per cent of their budgets at traditional brick-and-mortar retail outlets. The remaining seven per cent was expected to be spent on catalogue or direct mail orders.

In 2016, respondents expected to spend their budgets equally at online and in-store retail shops.

A similar study from FedEx found that as many as 65 per cent of Canadians would be shopping online for gifts this year. The statistic is up from the 55 per cent that said they’d be shopping online in 2016.

The trend to shop on the internet comes at the same time online retailer Amazon reported that Nov. 27, the first Monday after the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend, was its biggest retail day ever. On that day, now known as Cyber Monday, consumers placed more than 140 million orders with Amazon’s online stores.

The Deloitte survey is considered accurate to within plus or minus two percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The FedEx survey is accurate to within plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.